Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Books. And, in other news, I'm not dead.

Okay, I completely lifted this from Reclaiming Miss Havisham. Who, fyi, is completely teh awesome: check out her very helpful tips on saving the planet. I think I love her for these. They are basically worth a whole post, except it would just be me reiterating how great she is.

Essentially, it's a big ol' list of books of "books of pretension" and then you mark which you've read. She marked bold for read and italics for started but abandoned. I choose to do the same. Apparently I try to be more pretentious than I can quite manage...

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell 2. Anna Karenina 3. Crime and Punishment4. Catch-22 5. One Hundred Years of Solitude 6. Wuthering Heights 7. The Silmarillion 8. Life of Pi 9. The Name of the Rose 10. Don Quixote 11. Moby Dick 12. Ulysses 13. Madame Bovary 14. The Odyssey 15. Pride and Prejudice 16. Jane Eyre 17. The Tale of Two Cities 18. The Brothers Karamazov 19. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies 20. War and Peace 21. Vanity Fair 22. The Time Traveler’s Wife 23. The Iliad(? or possibly it was the Odyssey) 24. Emma 25. The Blind Assassin 26. The Kite Runner 27. Mrs. Dalloway 28. Great Expectations (albeit abridged -- shh...) 29. American Gods 30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 31. Atlas Shrugged 32. Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books 33. Memoirs of a Geisha 34. Middlesex 35. Quicksilver 36. Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West 37. The Canterbury Tales 38. The Historian : a novel 39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 40. Love in the Time of Cholera41. Brave New World 42. The Fountainhead (although the vitriol directed towards it almost makes me want to) 43. Foucault’s Pendulum 44. Middlemarch 45. Frankenstein 46. The Count of Monte Cristo 47. Dracula48. A Clockwork Orange 49. Anansi Boys 50. The Once and Future King 51. The Grapes of Wrath 52. The Poisonwood Bible : a novel 53. 1984 54. Angels & Demons 55. The Inferno 56. The Satanic Verses 57. Sense and Sensibility 58. The Picture of Dorian Gray 59. Mansfield Park 60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 61. To the Lighthouse 62. Tess of the D’Urbervilles 63. Oliver Twist 64. Gulliver’s Travels 65. Les Misérables (all 1000+ pages...) 66. The Corrections 67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (but I read his first novel, if that counts...) 68. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time 69. Dune 70. The Prince 71. The Sound and the Fury 72. Angela’s Ashes : a memoir 73. The God of Small Things 74. A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present 75. Cryptonomicon 76. Neverwhere 77. A Confederacy of Dunces 78. A Short History of Nearly Everything 79. Dubliners 80. The Unbearable Lightness of Being81. Beloved 82. Slaughterhouse-Five 83. The Scarlet Letter 84. Eats, Shoots & Leaves 85. The Mists of Avalon 86. Oryx and Crake : a novel 87. Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed 88. Cloud Atlas 89. The Confusion 90. Lolita 91. Persuasion 92. Northanger Abbey 93. The Catcher in the Rye 94. On the Road 95. The Hunchback of Notre Dame 96. Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything 97. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values 98. The Aeneid99. Watership Down100. Gravity’s Rainbow101. The Hobbit (oh, so many times did I start this and still: nothing)102. In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences103. White Teeth104. Treasure Island105. David Copperfield106. The Three Musketeers

Although: I question the snobbery level of some of these books. Watership Down, really? It's bunnies. I mean, sure it's all full of allegory, etc., but I'm pretty sure I first enjoyed it on a purely bunny level.

And Cryptonomicon has the best description of eating Cap'n Crunch that has even been written. Two pages of details -- that's, like, the anti-snobbery, right?